Unons sacrifice Madison janitors for Dems

The campaign to organize Madison janitors is dead, sacrificed on the alter of the Democratic Party.

As we noted here before, one fatal flaw of Business Unions is their inability to learn from defeats. In this case, the SEIU isn’t even admitting defeat. Instead, they announced that the organizing drive at CleanPower has simply “entered a new phase”—a phase curiously characterized by the organizers leaving town.

But we here at LaborLeft have no need to obfuscate. The unvarnished truth is that the SEIU and AFSCME took a dive on this one. They put the interest of Governor Doyle and the Democratic Party ahead of the interests of the janitors.

Recall that the SEIU’s strategy was to get the state to deny the new contract to CleanPower in favor of a more union-tolerant outfit. After a lot of hard work by a lot of dedicated people, they had the legal grounds for denying the contract to CleanPower and they began campaigning to get the state to do the right thing.

But the campaign had a strange twist. While the union and supporters held several aggressive actions, they never targeted Jim Doyle. Instead of picketing the Governor’s Office, they had us picketing the Risser Building. Instead of occupying the Governor’s Conference Room, we occupied conference rooms at the DOA building. Instead of demanding that Doyle cancel the contract, they demanded that minor civil servants at DOA cancel it.

This wasn’t oversight. On several occasions it was pointed out that the decision to dump CleanPower could be made by the Governor. This is a cabinet form of government and those DOA bureaucrats work for him. And it was an election year, so that Doyle might be sensitive to labor demands. But SEIU organizers could not utter the “D-word.” In the end, Doyle gave the contract to CleanPower even as the state AFL-CIO was campaigning to get him re-elected.

But let’s not forget that those janitors who clean state office buildings used to be AFSCME members. It was Republican Tommy Thompson who contracted out those jobs back in 1990. So, the naïve among us might assume that Doyle, the first Democrat to hold the office in 16 years, would reverse Thompson’s decision and make them unionized state employees again.

Doyle didn’t do that, of course. But, then, AFSCME made no visible demand that he do so. One might envision a campaign where, after his first election, AFSCME officials would meet privately with Doyle and demand that he reverse Thompson’s decision to contract out. And, if he didn’t do it, the union would steadily increase the heat through public exposure, leaflets and picket lines until he did so.

But, there’s an axiom of Business Unionism: “Never criticize a sitting Democrat.” If that means that a few hundred janitors have to continue working for poverty wages, well, labor has its priorities.

Resond to this article.

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